American Indian is a term applied to a person descended from the original inhabitants of the land that is now the continental United States of America. Christopher Columbus, encountered the Americas and brought news of his explorations to Europe in 1492. He named the people whom he met "Indians," believing that he had reached India. Columbus was mistaken, but his designation of the land's native people remained.
In all likelihood, the American Indians migrated to the Americas across the Bering Land Bridge. Upon arriving in the Americas, they evolved culturally, socially, economically, and politically into very diverse groups. Historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists generally divide the history of Indian people in Ohio into five time periods.

These time periods are:

The Paleoindian Period (13000 BC to 7000 BC)

The Archaic Period (8000 BC to 500 BC)

The Woodland Period (800 BC to AD 1200)

The Late Prehistoric Period (AD 1200 to circa AD 1650)

The Historic Period (AD 1650 to AD 1843)

As evidenced in this timeline, natives enjoyed a long and rich history before the arrival of Europeans in AD 1650. Once whites arrived in Ohio in the late seventeenth century, the lives of Ohio's Indians would never be the same.

For additional information on these specific eras, on the specific Indian nations that occupied Ohio, the Indian lifestyle, and native interactions with Europeans and white Americans, please browse these entries at your leisure.